curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
For a story based on a single source, it's weirdly detailed - technical aspects of the bomb, with informative anecdotes about the White House, Navy, the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy, CIA, State Department, NSA, Air Force ... for such a secret operation, all known to one person?
Hersh is a well-known investigative journalist, "exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting", "covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia". But more recently "Hersh has accused the Obama administration of lying about the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden and disputed the claim that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the Syrian Civil War", and "U.S. Defense Department spokesman Bryan G. Whitman said, "This reporter has a solid and well-earned reputation for making dramatic assertions based on thinly sourced, unverifiable anonymous sources." ... Slate magazine's James Kirchick wrote, "Readers are expected to believe that the story of the Bin Laden assassination is a giant ‘fairy tale’ on the word of a single, unnamed source... Hersh's problem is that he evinces no skepticism whatsoever toward what his crank sources tell him, which is ironic considering how cynical he is regarding the pronouncements of the U.S. national security bureaucracy."[26][76]". The wiki article has detail on many questionable claims.
Maybe if he'd managed to confirm parts of the source's story, but eh. The piece could've anticipated objections like 'one anonymous source with no other evidence', or more generally tried to convince instead of just providing novel-style narrative, but didn't. There's plenty of information in the article not from the source, but removed from the narrative it's just 'regular military exercises', 'military bases existing', 'media is unsure why explosions happened'. It's not implausible the US blew it up IMO, but this isn't convincing.
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
He/she basically did a fatfinger and gave the boss the wrong number. Yawn, with an asterisk
This is inverse TDS. Leaking the time and details of a military strike to a completely random person is bad! The sheer level of incompetence necessary for nobody to have checked that everyone in the chat was who they thought they were before sending the 'strike in two hours' message is insane! This is the kind of behavior that gets military secrets leaked to enemies. Apparently I hold my discord groupchats to a higher standard of security than freaking Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz do.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
I don't understand the claimed contradiction.
So Rubio taking over as the director of the agency and delegating actual responsibility to someone else appears totally legal, quotes from guests on NPR to the contrary notwithstanding.
I do not see any claims that Rubio being director is illegal. Sen Andy Kim claims "This is an entity that was created through federal statute, codified through federal statute, and something that cannot be changed, cannot be removed except through actions of Congress.", and I agree that significantly changing or removing it might be illegal, but not Rubio taking over.
Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material?
A lot of very unimportant things are 'classified'. A very small percent of 'classified material' are things that'd be genuinely bad if they got out. I don't think this is significant. The DOGE people accessing classified USAID information thing is probably similarly insignificant.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
I had really hoped Vance was smarter than this. If he was baited into it he shouldn't have bitten and if it was intentional then he should have known better.
Why do you think it's a blunder? This is the classic politician move, if you're asked about a losing issue, just deflect. It sounds bad, but it's less bad than actually addressing the question. There's a reason they all do it. It distracts, it muddies the waters a bit. My opponent's asking me this ridiculous question to distract from Border Czar Harris's invasion of migrant criminals and nation-destroying inflation et cetera.
Assuming he can't say "yes" because Trump won't let him, what else should he say?
The real blunder is that Trump won't just shut up about the election and let Vance say he'd certify. People who care about Trump saying the election is rigged are voting for him anyway. There's no harm in just lying here.* I have to imagine Trump and the people around him really believe it!
* obviously it's bad and corrosive but i'm taking the perspective of political strategy here, and they all lie (sorry, strategically take positions) anyway
It's probably real, but luck. He just does this constantly, right? If he does this for an hour a day every day for two years, and each round takes a minute, that's 40k rounds, and one in 40k seems like enough room for luck if he's already a bit accurate. And if he was this accurate with any consistency, he wouldn't have acted so shocked about it!
And you can get a lot of detail from a .1 second flash of an image. Some internet video memes flash various images by at ten per second, and if you pay attention you can get a lot of detail. Various studies find that even with <100ms people can still identify things. And that'd only improve if you practiced a lot, so I could see him narrowing it down to a general region from that, and then getting lucky.
no clear tells
I think if you're smart and you look at a hundred different (location, image) pairs, you'd pick up on a lot of associations between "how things look" and the location. Types of plants, style of buildings/roads, etc. If you've only seen a few hundred pairs signage style might be your only option.
This isn't a piece of modern architecture that intentionally disrupts mainstream understandings of aesthetics or w/e. It's a functional building. The couches, tables, and shades aren't nice and wooden, but they're good for outdoor conversation. The solar panels are probably there for green reasons, but even purely on economics they're a reasonable choice. And the roof isn't an ugly metal slope or anything, just normal tiles.
I don't think anyone finds it beautiful, but it seems fine. Even if you want marble columns in your $5M mansion, that's still secondary to the material function of the house - spending your day there, having people over, etc.
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
He's still coping in that essay. If he was truly thinking rationally (which doesn't have any special meaning beyond thinking well, really), differences in height and muscle mass alone should've been enough to make him deeply question that hypothesis, and then a single search in google scholar or about men and women playing sports against each other would put the question to bed. He wasn't really being isolated from evidence by his environment, or making reasonable conclusions from evidence, he was believing it because it'd be sexist and rude not to.
(The same is true, although less obviously so, about "intelligence" being a real thing that varies a lot between individuals. It's still amazing to me how many very smart people deny it.)
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
It feels like a lot of people here are doing the same thing progressives do when asked to defend affirmative action - they just come up with reasons why it might be a good thing, don't think about if it makes sense in context, and then argue it. Yeah, we need diversity because it makes teams more effective, diversity means different backgrounds and experiences, and look at this n=25 study from 2008!
In this case, Trump could have just said 'this funding freeze will go into effect in 90 days', and the agencies and departments would've all started begging for their money pretty quickly, without actually being defunded. Or just, like, used any other method of investigating what the government's spending money on, such as Google or the large amount of public data. These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web! Actually shutting it all down immediately doesn't accomplish much, other than making a lot of people mad or enthused on twitter.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
The main thing missing here is that a significant number of 78 year olds are in nursing homes or hospitals or in wheelchairs or use walkers or are demented. Trump's energy is a lot lower than 8 years ago, but he vigorously walks and talks. So that means his risk of death is significantly below the overall average. Not sure by how much though. I'm pretty sure the associations between alcohol/coke and risk of death are measuring confounding or something. Another thing to consider is the risk he declines like Biden did! They were both too old to be president, do you really trust either of them to make good decisions if woken up right at 2AM after a sudden nuclear or conventional attack...
Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students?
Consider what harvard graduates do. They become doctors, surgeons, chemistry professors, CEOs, judges, politicians. Each of these (except perhaps the last) greatly contributes to the well-being and/or advancement of society. Better surgeons mean you're less likely to die on the operating table. Smarter chemistry professors mean that, via convoluted causal channels, in twenty years your computers will be faster and your consumer products will be cheaper. CEOs, again, more capable society and cheaper consumer products. All of these matter much more even by sum-hedonistic ethics than the individual effect of Harvard on a student. Take the best individual tutor in the world and he can probably raise a 105iq person's SAT score more than the top scorer (who has a perfect score), but that's a waste of society's resources. Who benefits more from college-level mathematics, a child young tao or a randomly-selected underrepresented minority?
The claim is that the most 'meritorious' people are smarter and more capable, and will be better able to create, understand, and improve society than the less intelligent. G, IQ, intelligence, whatever you want to call it, some people are clearly more capable, generally, than others. And much of the cause is genetic.
Consider, from the parable of the talents, Scott Alexander's brother, who
When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now with me in my Introductory Piano class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there.
Well, one thing led to another, and my brother won several international piano competitions, got a professorship in music at age 25, and now routinely gets news articles written about him calling him “among the top musicians of his generation”.
Of course it's framed, in the story, as an example of how different people have different talents, a personal berkson's paradox. But, absent a strong genetic effect and some shared cause of general capability, how plausible is it that Scott, a talented writer followed by some of the smartest people in the world, just happens to be the brother of a world-class musician? Clearly Scott's brother had something that made him generally capable, and whatever it was was shared somehow. I think the marginal treatment effect of piano classes was larger for Scott's brother than the average child. This is why merit matters! And why society-wide tracking of skill and targeting the most skilled for training is very useful.
You know how every week there's a new "racist, homophobic hate crime", or "beloved tv star Guy Dickinson accused of disgusting sex crimes", or "latest: republicans literally genociding poor refugees to own the libs", but if you look into it for a few hours, or just wait a month, it was just not true - that hydra head crumbles to dust, only to be replaced by five more when you turn around?
The same is true of "vaccine sterilizing your ovaries with lipid nanoparticles", "blood clots killing millions", or "covid destroying the immune system", or a thousand others. The first dozen times I saw something, I looked into it, but that was two years ago. And it's from both sides! Unvaxxed sperm's left-wing mirror is amateur virologists on twitter speculating about virus-induced organ-failure because the hateful neoliberal right-wing won't let us enter our third year of lockdowns.
Meritocracy doesn't mean "flawless and perfect meritocracy", it means 'merit' is a very important factor. Random chance, idiosyncratic contingency, structural flaws, etc can explain why genius_1 gets lots of blog views and genius_2 doesn't. Human society is incredibly complicated. Many factors matter - for one, everythingstudies and status451 post less than once per month, while scott posts a few times per week. Some people who have more insight than scott just don't post, so we can't hear them at all! So the existence of smart people who are less popular than slightly less smart people, even in an honest meritocracy, isn't surprising at all! That said, quickly skimming Status 451, he's a significantly less skilled writer than scott and yud.
Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.
maybe they're favored by 'the rich and other entertainers' for the same reason they're favored by large groups of people - because they're smart and write well?
The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you
"put in front of you" in the sense that they're downstream of very complex and shaped processes, and "put in front of you" in the sense that the elite are intentionally putting controlled opposition intellectuals in front of you to hide the dark truth, are different!
what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say
scott clearly and reasonably believes in a somewhat-strong form of HBD, and often hints at it. another person popular among the 'rich' and 'other entertainers' is moldbug (apparently glenn greenwald was introduced to moldbug by an unnamed billionaire) , who says a number of not-allowed things. Yet another person popular among 'other entertainers' (he's sometimes retweeted by people like jack posobiec and cernovich, relatively-mainstream right wing media figures) is BAP, whose regularly retweets literal nazi propaganda (not using this to condemn, just illustrate evidence against your point)! So I'm not sure this theory works.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Epigenetics - as a mechanism for inheriting traits, across generations - is severely exaggerated by media, pop science, etc. A number of reasons for this: it's an easy way to escape HBD / blame racism / avoid the impact of genetics, and it just sounds cool. The number of proven cases where 'epigenetic mechanisms' contribute to heritable phenotypic differences in humans is small - especially compared to how "normal" genetics creates every aspect of human biology. On the other hand, epigenetic changes like DNA methylation and histone modification, as well as others, have many, many important effects in biology, just not ones that involve a child inheriting trait from a parent.
Here's a criticism, found in a gwern newsletter, of epigenetic inheritance of trauma
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
I mean with 300M people in a country, if just 5% of the top 99.99% at english lit talent want to be academics that's 1500 full-time jobs, too much for the top 10 institutions.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards
It's the opposite for me! We did a bunch of math, about a trillion trillion individual units of math, showing the math a few trillion words, and now the math can talk. This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation! It's exactly what esotericists didn't predict - it didn't come from divination, spiritual revelation, didn't come from finding the lost tomes of ancient civilizations, it didn't come from enlightenment, it came from physics and math.
It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
I don't think it's mysterious that behavior is changing simultaneously as the modern world completely reshapes the environment humans live in! Africa has phones, birth control, porn, and money too.
Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI
Nope, it's because we've developed a ton of advanced technology and it's doing a lot of weird things at the same time!
(note: this post has an aggressive tone, because, well, your posts do too! I'd still love to be corrected if I get any, or especially many, details wrong)
REAL Banned Books are decades out of print with publishers who refuse to rerelease them despite used copies going for hundreds of dollars due to pent-up demand
The actual books you list later 'go for hundreds of dollars' because there's very little volume, demand, or supply, so the 'spread' is extraordinarily wide and the market is very illiquid. Hundreds of dollars is the ask, not the bid. If there were hundreds of bids at hundreds of dollars, independent reprinters - think people like dropshippers - would just print a run of low-quality copies and sell them. The modern economy is quite decentralized for low and medium volume items, anyone can start selling these 'banned books' if there's demand. And, indeed, various far-right individuals have started selling old right-wing books on the internet as that movement has grown! I think it is extremely unreasonable to use 'this book costs hundreds of dollars on amazon' as evidence for a ban, when it's also evidence for 'not many people want to buy this. There are so many out-of-print books that cost hundreds of dollars.
Wikipedia editors, and librarians slowly remove and suppress references to the work that they increasingly become impossible to even be aware of.
As far as I can tell, this straightforwardly does not happen in the present day. Can you please provie a single example of this? I feel like you're just making that up because it fits a narrative. Wikipedia loves talking about things like the Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf (and, yeah, how bad they are). Various leftist academics I follow on twitter just love digging up an old and forgotten far-right thinker to discuss.
and for an even rarer subset, mere possession can result in years if not decades in prison even in countries all the indexes and US diplomats proudly label “Full Liberal Democracies”.
... Yeah, some non-Ameican countries are terrible about free speech. I think these books are the ones it's reasonable to describe is banned. As you say, though that's "an even rarer subset".
If the book is truly effectively banned, if the post-totalitarian state has truly effected its disappearance, it will not appear anywhere one might search for a forbidden work, even in mention. It will have merely disappeared… as if it were never written
I don't think this is slightly true for any of the books you mention!
I remember digging a copy of James Burnham’s The Machiavellians
... . James Burnham "chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy" and "was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics". The Machiavellians is in his wikipedia infobox under 'notable works'.
(you said on twitter) Burnham was $700 on Amazon 8 years ago… the fact he’s back in print now after a major effort does not change the fact he was disapeared
He was not disappeared! People became less interested in him, so his work was printed less. Then people became more interested, so it was printed again.
I glanced at the "full list" image, and the first thing that I spotted was a book by Jimmy Carter - Palestine, Peace not Aparthied. A US President? ... Really? I found some controversy over the book, but was unable to find something that seems to be a "ban" as you'd describe above.
So ya, I’m already trapped like Johnny Depp in this oldest and most dangerous of obsessions
On War, Mein Kampf, Various books by nazis
Not currently banned, widely available for purchase, on reading lists for university history courses, etc. Less popular ones than Mein Kampf are harder to find because they're ... less popular, not becuase they're bannd. It feels like you're mixing "currently banned by our post-totalitarian regime" and "banned in the past right after a war by a state significantly less liberal by current standards than we are" into the same "vibe".
David Irving’s Hitler’s War
When was this banned or suppressed? Note that it has an incredibly long wikipedia article dedicated to it, discussing it and subsequent rebuttals. Remember what you claimed:
Wikipedia editors, and librarians slowly remove and suppress references to the work that they increasingly become impossible to even be aware of.
This is not happening.
... In general, this seems like a quite decent list of "divisive, controversial, taboo, and sometimes banned" books. It is just not a list of banned books. You don't even attempt to justify the "banned" status of most books on the list. I get that wildly exaggerating your claims is your whole "thing", but I think in the very long run it hurts you and your positions more than it helps, by fractionating your potential audience such that the exact people you want to reach - people who are extremely smart and mostly disagree with you but are interested in hearing you out - are put off by your work. And in the 'barberpole model' of culture, this means you're missing out on converting people at the top of the pole, and everything flows down from them. Also, it means you'll end up believing a bunch of incorrect things and developing ideas carelessly, which might end up meaning you focus on things like the aesthetics of historical warfare and romanticizing the idea of looking sexy as a moral value while your progressive enemies keep their eye on the ball and obsess over and gain increasing control over the most powerful technology of the century and maybe all of history. Hypothetically.
I will say, this post is a great window into how those unreliable, huge 4chan political image collage memes are made.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Nuking the third-party apps and killing pushshift are both overall surplus-destroying moves, especially since Reddit's search function does not work and their mobile app sucks (and mostly in ways that are orthogonal to extracting money from users!). I'm not entirely sure how the admins benefit from making the API prices this artificially high to kill apps? If you're worried about ads, why not just introduce an ad SDK for third-party mobile apps or require them to give you 50% of their in app purchase revenue or something. Also not sure that banning pushshift and requiring paid API access will stop scraping for LLMs, because normal web scraping of HTML the way archive.org, google, and everyone else does still works.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Let's say I love trump, and read this post. Am I persuaded otherwise? Even if I dislike Trump, do I gain anything?
Watching the press briefing Trump gave... something in me finally broke.
What press briefing? What broke? You changed your mind on trump - millions of people have. What made the difference? As it stands, not a good post.
Sex-segregating the prisons is part of how you keep the prison rape rate as close to zero as possible. This is like "frankly, there shouldn't be seatbelts or airbags. Cars should just not crash". Well, they don't not crash, so seatbelts and airbags are useful. And the rape rate in sex-segregated prisons is still nonzero. If you have some idea about how to make the rape rate zero without sex-segregation ... feel free to propose it.
At the same time, it is true that 'trans rape in prison' is an extremely noncentral objection to trans issues as a whole.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Probably not a language model. Reddit has had spambots since it was available on the web. A very common form of reddit spambot just reposts pieces of other peoples' comments - not to push a message or anything, just to gain karma, so the account can get past simple spam filters and be used later or sold. Same for repost bots - repost old posts, get karma, use or sell.
Looking closer - conclusionfirm's comment has been removed, while breathagreeable's is still up - breathagreeable has an active post history, while that's conclusionfirm's only comment - from your SS, conclusionfirm's is newer than breathagreeable's - and conclusionfirms' comment is a direct substring of breathagreeable's! So it's almost certainly that spambot strategy, breath posted a real comment, conclusion reposted a substring of it to get karma - and not gpt3 or anything.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
It's very rare anyone cares about being competent and effective at mass killing. Anyone sophisticated enough to potentially do that is sophisticated enough to have more useful goals (and also is probably embedded in modern social structures that think killing people is, like, bad). If you're a mass shooter who wants to kill people as a form of revenge, killing 100 isn't going to communicate much that killing 5 didn't. https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
It's loosely analogous to 'why are so few suicide attempts successful'? I can't imagine it's difficult to effectively kill yourself if you prepare well, it's just that most people who want to do it are doing it for reasons that don't fit well with effectiveness
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Funnily enough:
One of the earliest described cases of BID was termed apotemnophilia by Money in 1977
Yes, that John Money!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
If you're gonna reppost your substack piece here, please at least put in the effort to copy the whole contents of the post into your toplevel. If Ymeskhout can do it, you can too. And maybe less of "Remember to subscribe"?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
This post needs a lot more elaboration. Many mottizens are straightforwardly conservatives, so 'degenerate tendencies in Con politics', conservatives coming from 'lost causers', 'proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion' aren't going to land as anything other than insults. And even if we were all on your team, it's still better to explain why something is true than just state it. As someone who disagrees - I don't love 'conservatism' either but just don't see the strong connections to the South - why should this persuade me?
This is a somewhat popular opinion on 'the left' though, I've seen it on twitter a bunch.
"Emotions" aren't fundamental, independent causes of human action, they're contingent, useful adaptations that coexist with the rest of thought. If I see homeless and drug addicts on a subway, and "feel scared and vulnerable", and then stop using the subway, am I being irrational? What if instead, I see homeless and drug addicts on the subway, know from personal experience that homeless drug addicts have a significantly increased risk of violence, theft, and unsanitary conditions, and rationally decide to stop taking the subway? Yet the 'feeling scared and vulnerable' from the first example is entirely informed by the judgements in the second example - the reason you're "afraid" of homeless and not normal people is observations of the way homeless act that indicate they're a risk to life or health, for the same reason your fear of 'a gun being pointed at you' comes from knowledge that 'guns shoot bullets, which can hurt you'. But aren't all 'emotions' like this, being evolutionary adaptations to survival?
The same thing applies to large-scale policy. If a small group of people causes significant harm to everyone else in a nation, and I emotionally feel for the plight of my countrymen, and advocate for policy to restrain the small group ... or I rationally observe that my countrymen are being harmed, and add up all the expected utilities, and advocate for policy to restrain the small group ... what's different here?
Also, consider "lock the murderers up,
slaughterpermanently imprison mass murderers, forget about the problem" or "lock the fraudsters up, forget about the problem". We already do this to large groups of malign or harmful people, and it works! It's bad for 'free thinkers' because free thinkers are (sometimes) good/useful, not because hurting people is, in every context, bad.The government uses force to prevent all sorts of consensual activity. You want to buy food from a restaurant with poor hygiene? Want to do unlicensed, shoddy maintenance on other peoples' cars? Sell unlicensed pharmaceuticals? Take out large, predatory loans? These aren't edge cases, these are large potential areas of economic activity that are prevented.
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